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QEMU v4.0.0 released

qemu.org

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Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#81

Post by pletnes »

tym0 wrote: post #77

I use Virtualbox on home PC to dev. I ssh into it and use tmux/vim as my IDE. Is there a better setup for performance on windows? Should I bite the bullet and get myself a Windows Pro upgrade for Hyper-V? If my memory serves well you Hyper-V can't have Hyper-V and Virtualbox at the same time.

True. I use vmware and my ubuntu vm is faster than my windows host. This makes hyper-v and docker on windows incompatible, though. I run i3 inside vmware. I would expect virtualbox to be ok too, for this use case.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#82

Post by mikece »

I have not upgraded to the latest VMWare Workstation -- should I take a look at QEMU first or is this something meant for a completely different use case? (I use VMWare Workstation for contracting/consulting and build out a workstation to match the client engagement rather than pollute my base OS with five different versions of Visual Studio; IntilliJ, Eclipse, AND Android Studio; multiple version of SQL Server/PostgreSQL/Mongo/MySQL... and I can dump those VMs off to network storage when I'm done with the engagement and reclaim the storage space on my laptop.)

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#83

Post by bloopernova »

idoubtit wrote: post #5

Last week, I intended to replace VirtualBox with QEMU for my personal use. The spartiate documentation made it really hard. I lack the competence to seriously contribute. The official documentation just explains the numerous parameters. It also points to tutorials (wikibook, etc), which unfortunately are very basic and out of sync. Even Arch Linux does not provide a good documentation (lack of clarity, some obsolete…

When I was running a Fedora desktop and was doing a lot of dev/test work on VMs+Foreman+Puppet, I used Libvirt+QEMU as the VM hypervisor.

I ran Foreman inside a CentOS VM, which talked to my desktop's Libvirtd to provision new VMs, hand out IPs via DHCP, boot via TFTP, then kickstart. It worked pretty well, and helped me to spin up a vcenter foreman controlled dev environment for a few hundred users in just a few days.

My recommendation would be Vagrant + Libvirt.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#84

Post by naasking »

chousuke wrote: post #35
vero2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have several windows vms running in virtualbox. All have rdp/vnc for specialised programs. (These are offline). Everytime I tried to migrate to qemu or virt-manager or gnome-boxes it was a real nightmare especially installing SPICE+virtio drivers+ networking. I read in Phoronix the performance of virtualbox is subpar and all KVM/qemu is the way to go. Please, could the OSS community build a easy to use GUI that SP…

I confess that I haven't run Windows with virt-manager on my own desktop in a long while, but it worked just fine after installing the required drivers at install time. IIRC Redhat distributes signed drivers for Windows for free. The problems I did have were with VMs I tried to convert from VMware to KVM, and those stemmed from Windows' inability (version 7) to properly handle changing hardware. Perhaps it's better a…

Did this recently. It runs ok, but input and responsiveness latency is very noticeable.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#85

Post by nwatson »

vero2 wrote: post #21
chousuke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using QEMU directly is a bit tricky and it's not really intended to be used in that fashion by most users, unlike VirtualBox. Both gnome-boxes and virt-manager use QEMU under the hood though, and they provide a point-and-click experience. I use virt-manager myself and I do not think it's any more difficult than VirtualBox is.

We have several windows vms running in virtualbox. All have rdp/vnc for specialised programs. (These are offline). Everytime I tried to migrate to qemu or virt-manager or gnome-boxes it was a real nightmare especially installing SPICE+virtio drivers+ networking. I read in Phoronix the performance of virtualbox is subpar and all KVM/qemu is the way to go. Please, could the OSS community build a easy to use GUI that SP…

About 12 years ago when I had access to Microsoft MSDN I got a big SuperMicro box, set it up with CentOS 4 (RHEL) Linux, and used QEMU/KVM to set up a Windows domain controller and several other Windows VMs, and several Linux VMs, on a couple of virtual subnets, along with iptables port forwarding, Windows Remote Desktop, VNC, and many services. Some of the Linux VMs services authenticated with the Windows domain. I wanted to set up at least one non-x86/x64 emulated-CPU VM but never got that working very well in QEMU.

The exercise was a good (and incremental) learning experience and increased my general networking and sys-admin knowledge, which I've used well as part of my software engineering career. I would have been lost in many professional situations without it. QEMU/KVM are awesome.

EDIT: more and better words

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#86

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

mikece wrote: post #82

I have not upgraded to the latest VMWare Workstation -- should I take a look at QEMU first or is this something meant for a completely different use case? (I use VMWare Workstation for contracting/consulting and build out a workstation to match the client engagement rather than pollute my base OS with five different versions of Visual Studio; IntilliJ, Eclipse, AND Android Studio; multiple version of SQL Server/Postg…

Yes, qemu can do that.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#87

Post by ttflee »

founderling wrote: post #2

Anybody here using QEMU? What is your use case?

Trying to run Linux and Windows guest on macOS host with hvf acceleration. Found that FreeBSD won’t boot perhaps due to lack of support of v86 mode IVT in hvf part.

Also trying to setup gvt-g with dmabuf but corner cases still need fixes, e.g. video playback doesn’t work on overlay sprite of yuv encoding.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#88

Post by throwaway2048 »

antocv wrote: post #78
kashyapc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launching QEMU directly is not merely "tricky", but incredibly inefficient and ineffective once you need something that's beyond bare minimal. E.g. here is a minimal QEMU command-line that gives you access to a serial console in the guest: `qemu-system-x86_64 -display none -no-user-config -nodefaults -m 2048 -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi -device virtio-serial-pci -serial stdio -drive file=/export/cirros.qcow2,forma…

> like running the QEMU process as an unprivileged user, Anyone can run your example "qemu-system-x86_64 -display none -no-user-config -nodefaults -m 2048 -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi -device virtio-serial-pci -serial stdio -drive file=/export/cirros.qcow2,format=qcow2,if=virtio" from the command line/bash, as non-root user, yet libvirt which requires root to install, and is expecting root to configure it, is bett…

its not true that libvirt adds nothing of value, it adds easy networking support, easy snapshots, a nice gui interface, a very nice remote protocol and clients (that seamlessly support both graphical and serial output, aswell as on the fly reconfiguration of VMs without restarting them), template VMs (including one time initial provision setup), easy support for storage pools including remote ones, an easy way to manipulate RAM usage on live VMs, easy PCI and USB passthrough, live migration to other hosts, etc etc.

Sure its possible to do all this without libvirt, but it comes as one integrated, easy to manage package instead of hundreds of disparate parts.

You might not need (all) these features, but to claim libvirt is useless is extremely parochial.

Its also untrue that it needs root, you can virt-manager for instance without a root libvirtd instance at all, and it will run VMs without any permissions needed.

Re: QEMU v4.0.0 released

#90

Post by throwaway2048 »

vero2 wrote: post #21
chousuke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using QEMU directly is a bit tricky and it's not really intended to be used in that fashion by most users, unlike VirtualBox. Both gnome-boxes and virt-manager use QEMU under the hood though, and they provide a point-and-click experience. I use virt-manager myself and I do not think it's any more difficult than VirtualBox is.

We have several windows vms running in virtualbox. All have rdp/vnc for specialised programs. (These are offline). Everytime I tried to migrate to qemu or virt-manager or gnome-boxes it was a real nightmare especially installing SPICE+virtio drivers+ networking. I read in Phoronix the performance of virtualbox is subpar and all KVM/qemu is the way to go. Please, could the OSS community build a easy to use GUI that SP…

Install the guest tools for windows from here

https://www.spice-space.org/download.html

It will contain everything you need for a fairly seamless experience on windows, and libvirtd and virt-manager make host side a cakewalk as well.

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